The Trinidad Guardian Newspaper - Marsha Pearcehttp://www2.guardian.co.tt/byline-authors/marsha-pearce
enTomorrow, tomorrowhttp://www2.guardian.co.tt/arts/2017-02-27/tomorrow-tomorrow
<div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://www2.guardian.co.tt/sites/default/files/field/image/Address.jpg" width="722" height="623" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>How do you see T&amp;T? Does a nation forged in fires of hope still hold promise? Richard Mark Rawlins’ latest artwork uses iconography from the orphan Annie musical and the fuel of local politics to attend to concerns about personal and collective expectations for the future. “The sun will come out tomorrow,” sings Annie, “just thinking about tomorrow clears away the cobwebs and the sorrow ‘til there’s none.” In this interview with MARSHA PEARCE, Rawlins gives insight into his installation A Dress to the Nation-a work that is equally attractive in its ornamental appearance and irksome in its repetitive accompanying soundtrack. Rawlins points to a tomorrow steeped in appeal and frustration. In speaking about his work, he also shares his views on the politics of art and culture.</p>
<p><strong>MP: You often include words in your artwork, with some pieces exploiting meanings and ambiguities, putting a spotlight on wordplay. Tell me about your fascination with words in the context of your art making practice.</strong></p>
<p>RMR: I live and work as a graphic designer; it was how I was trained. I am accustomed to communicating visually with words and images. I love typography, mass communications, and printmaking. I think of letters as texture. Art, like design, is work. I started using words in my work as a way of connecting the dots. It is a narrative approach to design, which I incorporate into my art. This seems natural to me since we are surrounded by words: mauvais langue, picong, patois, dancehall lyrics, soca, kaiso, good and bad sign painting, fete sign culture and the fact that we speak with our hands when relating a story.</p>
<p>I am always pushing to be able to speak to people in my work, always seeking to break the passive nature of viewing art. Words help me share my sketchbook thoughts and opinions and, in some cases, issue a challenge to the viewer to go deeper than the surface and look for their own story. I am literally trying to make art that ‘speaks’ to people, as language has the potential to serve as an art form. The thing about it is this: once the words are there, it’s hard to avoid reading them. In the context of a white cube or alternate gallery space the WORD may actually have more power than in the pages of a magazine or a book.</p>
<p><strong>How did the idea for this new work come about? What was your intention for the work?</strong></p>
<p>A Dress to the Nation is commentary. The idea to do this came about sometime ago while I was watching a recap via social media of an address to the nation by our Prime Minister. It started me thinking about the importance of the term “an address to the nation” and what it means today.</p>
<p>For one thing, in my 50-year span, I’ve seen countless addresses to the nation. As a child I remember hustling home with my family to make sure we did not miss whatever important thing was going to be said. I was too young to understand what it meant then. As I got older and more politically aware, I realised they had come to mean responses to public outcry, a clear position on an unwavering policy of some sort, the announcement of a coup, an explanation of how the country’s coat of arms managed to get onto a bottle of champagne, or to reassure a nation, that things will get better. An address was an opportunity to say: “It’s a little rough right now, but it will get better-tomorrow not today, it will be better. Maybe.”</p>
<p>Well I’m significantly older now, and ironically, the addresses to the nation don’t seem to hold the power they once had. Social media has eliminated the need to hurry home to hear the address at a specific time, and the public seems to be even more confused after the address than before it began - if one goes by the comments on social media anyway. So I decided I would design and make a dress out of enough material to make two national flags, and incorporate some lace and frou-frou into it so that it would be a Trinbagonian contemporary art take on the little orphan Annie dress. There’s a big bow on it and everything, a real fancy, pretty thing. I designed the dress and had my friend, fashion designer Lisa Gittens, fabricate it for me as I can’t sew. Well, I can sew a little bit but I can’t sew-sew.</p>
<p>Then I created a soundtrack to go with the installation. I added an irritating 11-hour loop of the song Tomorrow from the movie Annie, and threw in my daughter’s old tap shoes and that was it. The tap shoes are a nod to the Annie musical and they complete the outfit. However they also suggest the idea of tap dancing around issues or maybe tap tapity tap tap as we wait and wait. As intentions go, I’d like people to see it and really begin to think about what these promises of “hope” mean for our country. It’s a personal narrative for all of us really. The original working title for the piece was A Dress to the Nation: Hope and Fear at the Edge of Feasibility.</p>
<p><strong>What do you see as some of the politics - power machinations - of the art scene in T&amp;T?</strong></p>
<p>I have a question written on my studio wall: “How do we escape the gatekeepers?” I’ve learned it is the tree in the forest thing. If you aren’t aware of any gatekeepers, do they exist? The answer for me is, no. Well, that’s what I thought. Then I applied for a local fund aimed at cultural producers. It was my intention to produce a book about my recent exhibition Finding Black. After a month of not hearing any word, I called only to be politely informed: “Nah yuh didn’t get through. We can’t help you at this time.”</p>
<p>Now you probably will never see a painting with the words “I AM NOT YUH N---A” on a T&amp;T High Commission wall or an embassy or a nice family restaurant, and the work I produce doesn’t fall under what is considered “culture,” and maybe it makes people uncomfortable. Yet, why must consideration only be given to funding Best Village, chutney and Carnival shows and historical documentation? Is the pursuit of “CULTyah” the only realm of understanding in our art space? If, as writer James Baldwin noted, the artist’s job is to disrupt the public space, then am I not doing my job?</p>
<p>I guess, in a nutshell, the real ‘power machinations’ are those that would see the ‘contemporary’ and the ‘conceptual’ as useless, or worse, dangerous while establishing a safe position of conservatism for our society, based on their own capitalist ideals or agendas. They are a problem. I will leave you with this: I once heard a Minister of Culture tell the audience at a book launch: “I used to draw yuh know but, I give that up. It didn’t have no money in that.”</p>
<p>Richard Mark Rawlins’ A Dress to the Nation is installed at Alice Yard, 80 Roberts Street Woodbrook, Port-of-Spain, and is available to the public any time from March 3- 8. Audiences can also find a related poster design by Rawlins at Alice Yard’s adjunct space known as Granderson Lab, 24 Erthig Road, Belmont.</p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 27 Feb 2017 06:54:41 +0000alexk126879 at http://www2.guardian.co.ttMarsha PearceA breath of fresh airhttp://www2.guardian.co.tt/lifestyle/2017-01-29/breath-fresh-air
<div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://www2.guardian.co.tt/sites/default/files/field/image/Art6Gallery_BoydCrichlowHinkson.png" width="400" height="225" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>“The art world needs a breath of new air,” said Wesley Kanhai, the 25-year-old instigator and administrator of the new Art 6 Gallery in St Clair, Port-of-Spain.</p>
<p>The question of how to support creatives and sell art remains a concern around the world. Debates revolve around exploring or abandoning brick-and-mortar gallery models in a climate of rising operating costs and the allure of the Internet as an alternative space for connecting artists and audiences.</p>
<p>Kanhai is a graduate of the UWI visual arts certificate programme and an experienced designer—having worked for roughly a decade on an array of residential and commercial interiors with Brian MacFarlane and Roger Myers. He offers the local market an approach to art with an attention to bridging divides.</p>
<p>The new gallery is a response to a power play associated with space. It is the product of “the outrage of a young artist trying to do his stuff,” said Kanhai, “trying to get out there, yet being turned down because everywhere is booked. The market is also structured in a way where it is about who knows who.”</p>
<p>Art 6 Gallery launched early in January with work by six artists: Kenwyn Crichlow and Jackie Hinkson, both identified in the exhibit as “highlighted artists,” Michelle Boyd and Michelle Tappin, labelled “established artist and Esther Griffith and Kanhai deemed “emerging artists.” How the categories of an iconic, established and emerging practitioner are defined is often a slippery endeavour but the idea of showing these three classifications in one group exhibition is a model Kanhai plans to hold for future curatorial efforts.</p>
<p>While the gallery will be open to solo shows, Kanhai remains committed to thinking about and making connections: “A solo show of art by an emerging or established artist could be the prequel to a show of iconic works,” he said.</p>
<p>This effort at blurring boundary lines is also found in his desire to give greater prominence to art forms not found as staples in local galleries. “Art 6 is a place where photography and film can develop and be respected more in a gallery setting,” he said.</p>
<p>Kanhai’s vision is one of transcending a tendency to understand the visual, sonic and olfactory arts as silos. The gallery brings visual works into dialogue with the gentle babble of water fountains, the aroma of lit candles,and sound piped through speakers. Kanhai has also partnered with Con Brio furniture and home accents shop to include benches, tables and other components in order to add to a multidimensional experience of art.</p>
<p>This idea of relationships is heightened by the fact that audiences must walk through the gallery to enter Ambrosia, a new café offering a range of options from vegan and vegetarian meals to grass-fed beef dishes and gluten, soy-and-dairy-free servings. A beauty bar is also expected to open next to the gallery.</p>
<p>This proximity of other business operations invites thought on how to build audiences for art-feeding into global conversations about art institutions and audience engagement.</p>
<p>Education programmes will also be linked with the gallery. Classes are planned for the on-site courtyard. “The classes will heavily work on the CXC syllabus,” Kanhai said.</p>
<p>Keeping the idea of interconnectedness in mind, Kanhai is also tying the physical gallery space with the digital arena. The initiative called 3x300 (which is still in development) will be an online feature of Art 6 and, according to Kanhai, will be an avenue for bringing emerging artists and emerging collectors together.</p>
<p>Art 6 is a beautiful gallery-skylight included—with a capacity to host what Kanhai refers to as a standing collection. “Works not sold will float around the building,” he said. Yet, as with all new ventures, there are aspects that will require further consideration.</p>
<p>While the gallery has been established to run with a credo of inclusiveness, that is, with “a belief that everyone should be able to afford, collect, learn and live with art,” there is an air of class tension that cannot be ignored.</p>
<p>He is working on creating an online presence that is democratic and accessible but there is still the digital divide as a challenge to the gallery’s notion of “everyone”. When asked about the potential exclusivity of the space, Kanhai responded: “Our doors are open to you to make that first step.”</p>
<p>• Art 6 Gallery is located at 6 Scott Street, St Clair, Port-of-Spain. Its Living With Art exhibition closed yesterday. • More info: Email: <a href="mailto:info@art6.gallery">info@art6.gallery</a> or 220-2786.</p>
</div></div></div>Sun, 29 Jan 2017 08:05:39 +0000jbirch101125690 at http://www2.guardian.co.ttMarsha PearceDoig + Walcott = T&T art alivehttp://www2.guardian.co.tt/lifestyle/2017-01-08/doig-walcott-tt-art-alive
<div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://www2.guardian.co.tt/sites/default/files/field/image/Morning.jpg" width="400" height="562" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>Sunday Arts Section art writer Marsha Pearce and books writer Shivanee Ramlochan each gives her impression of the recently published collection of poems and paintings by Derek Walcott and Peter Doig. Though Walcott is St Lucian, he has significant ties to Trinidad; Doig is Scottish but has lived in T&amp;T since 2002.</p>
<p><strong>Painterly sounds, poetic sights</strong></p>
<p>A review by MARSHA PEARCE</p>
<p>There is a history of a paragone or competition among the arts that includes a debate on painting versus poetry. Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks record his advocacy of seeing and the superiority of painting as a means of imitating the world, in contrast to poetry, which according to da Vinci, relies on sound and an abstraction of the world in word form.</p>
<p>“While poetry extends to the figuration of forms, actions, and place in words, the painter is moved by the real similitudes of forms to counterfeit these forms. Now consider which is a closer examination of man, his name or his similitude?” says da Vinci.</p>
<p>“If the poet acts through the senses by way of the ear, the painter (does so) by way of the more worthy sense of the eye,” he adds.</p>
<p>In the new book Morning, Paramin by poet laureate Derek Walcott and artist Peter Doig, who is described as one of the most renowned living figurative painters, Walcott points to Doig's work as more than products of sight and as images that do not firmly adhere to a label of figurative art.</p>
<p>Ear and eye are positioned on a level playing field.</p>
<p>In Portrait (Under Water) Doig paints an almost completely submerged man.</p>
<p>Watery, curvilinear strokes in blue and green, snake by his ears and lap his forehead. In the distance, masses of earth rise from the water.</p>
<p>This piece is a point of departure for one of Walcott's poems entitled Abstraction.</p>
<p>The poet reimagines Doig's depiction of water as undulating sound waves.</p>
<p>He writes: “We imagine that we can hear what certain painters/heard as they worked: Pollock the cacophony of traffic/O'Keefe the engines of certain lilies, Bearden/cornets muffled in velvet, Peter Doig the brooding, breeding silence of deep bush/the chuckle of a lagoon.”</p>
<p>This particular poem and painting epitomise a relationship of creative expression to the multisensory.</p>
<p>Doig’s works are not only his visual perceptions of Trinidad rendered in recognisable forms but abstractions of what he has heard and felt-painted reactions to a place where, as Walcott observes, the society’s “endeavour is composed in song.”</p>
<p>Walcott hears music in Doig’s painting titled Milky Way. He responds to Doig’s picture of a night sky in cobalt and indigo, stained with a streak of stars that appears like spilt milk.</p>
<p>Walcott shares: “A tenor pan repeating its high note/flowers of brass cornets, maracas stars/an alto sax’s interrupting throat/a burst of rain from drizzling guitars.”</p>
<p>Morning, Paramin brilliantly spotlights the auditory dimension in Doig’s work, exposing the “melody concealed” in the painter’s canvas, while also attending to the poet’s act as not only an appeal to the ear but a practice of image building.</p>
<p>Throughout the book Walcott constructs an intense picture of his experiences of ageing, love and loss; of flora, fauna, friends and family-speckled with a belly-rocking humour.</p>
<p>The reader sees Walcott’s life, hears Doig’s art, smells the mountain air, tastes pain and cringes at the thought of touching a bat’s wax wings.</p>
<p>In this book—where poems and paintings make richly layered connections, where Walcott tells Doig: “my pen and your brushstroke blend in the one metre”—all of the senses are worthy.</p>
<p><strong>Sure and sharp-beaked</strong></p>
<p>A review by SHIVANEE RAMLOCHAN</p>
<p>The young Caribbean poet may find it hard to outrun St Lucian Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott. Whether one has read him or not, his influence is ascribed. Perhaps in similar fashion, the young and worldly artist may not be able to elude Scottish painter Peter Doig, whose White Canoe earned over US $11 million at Sotheby's in 2007.</p>
<p>Both Doig and Walcott have broken records, earned enviable laurels: what emerges, then, when they turn their attentions to one shared space?</p>
<p>The result, Morning, Paramin (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016) is not loud or showy: it channels death, sure and sharp-beaked as a waiting corbeau, in both verse and image.</p>
<p>It would be best for Walcott and Doig devotees to leave their preconceptions on this book at the waiting mat of their collective fan-worship.</p>
<p>The poems and their corresponding artworks resist pre-judgment not only with skill, but with playfulness.</p>
<p>Yes, death and all its vultures linger in these poems, but so too do limes at Studio Film Club at the Fernandes Compound, Laventille, where the refrain calls for “a Carib and a half-pack of Anchor.”</p>
<p>Counterpoising the jocular with the melancholic, Walcott’s new poems are simple without being simplistic, and rarely short on a very specific kind of humour.</p>
<p>These are the offerings of an aged, not youthful comedian—one who has taken the measurement of every situation, every societal tableau, and knows the lay of the land a thousand times over.</p>
<p>This might be why Morning, Paramin possesses such artistic self-reliance: it seeks to impress no one.</p>
<p>The intimacy of affection and regard has already been established, and it is between Walcott and Doig themselves, an intimacy they magnanimously share with the reader.</p>
<p>In this sense, the collaboration is a curtain peeled back to allow the sight of a remarkable friendship, a fluid conversation between two creative participants that will endure past their combined mortal span.</p>
<p>It is a small act of mathematics to deduce whether the paintings predate the poems, or vice versa, yet this approach to unlocking the hybrid work’s heart is short-sighted at best, reductive at worst.</p>
<p>There is a natural synchronicity between each pairing of painting and poem, whether the subject is Lapeyrouse Cemetery; Santa Cruz; the sweep of light over Venezuelan hills.</p>
<p>There is a certain affinity to place in the movements of these poems, gliding as they do between Trinidad and the world outside Trinidad—but none with the constancy of desire devoted to Paramin, a place where “the name said by itself could make us laugh as if some deep, deep secret was hidden there.”</p>
<p>For each place signified by Walcott, the visual language of Doig compels the reader there—not scene for scene, nor frame for frame, but with a less common skill than merely repeating in painting what Walcott renders in verse.</p>
<p>In the Paramin pairing, Doig’s Untitled (Jungle Painting) flanks the poem, featuring a shadowed figure emerging from—or retreating into—the leafy bush.</p>
<p>There is no immediate counterpart to this image in the narration of the poem, yet the synapses between Doig and Walcott could not be clearer or more resonant.</p>
<p>This might well be the work’s most vital asset—if it retains any secrets between painter and poet, those secrets do not interfere with the reader’s absorption and ultimate entrancement.</p>
<p>Walcott’s poems are immediate and bristling with life; they are no less alive than when they court the active contemplation of death.</p>
<p>This is verse that shuns abstraction. The threads of meaning are clear, rinsed of artifice and posturing.</p>
<p>“Everything dies from its desire, even the fireflies, even the shuttering eyes of a loved wife.”</p>
<p>In this line from In the Arena, the exposed emotional underbelly of Morning, Paramin is at its clearest.</p>
<p>Life, in all its brightness and capacity for grandeur, outruns us all.</p>
<p>The only temporary antidote, Walcott and Doig declare in this arresting marriage of form, is to make the art one can, and to sustain the conversations that exist between two old friends.</p>
<p>Walcott calls Lapeyrouse its own sustaining city “where headstones multiply like sails on a Sunday … where people think pain or pan is good for the soul.”</p>
<p>We are all, in essence, circling our own Lapeyrouses, and the journeys in between light our footsteps to that final sailing home.</p>
<p><strong>MORNING, PARAMIN</strong></p>
<p>Derek Walcott and Peter Doig</p>
<p>Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016</p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 09 Jan 2017 01:22:32 +0000alexk124972 at http://www2.guardian.co.ttMarsha PearceShivanee RamlochanArt of the times: A look back at T&T’s 2016 art scenehttp://www2.guardian.co.tt/lifestyle/2017-01-01/art-times-look-back-tt%E2%80%99s-2016-art-scene
<div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://www2.guardian.co.tt/sites/default/files/field/image/In%20Formation.jpg" width="400" height="236" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>What happened in T&amp;T for the year 2016? Was there a prevailing mood? What were the key concerns and points of view? Dutch-American historian Hendrik Willem Van Loon notes: “The arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our world than the stock market.”</p>
<p>With Van Loon’s statement as a guide, a look at some of the visual arts created/exhibited over the past 12 months gives insight to the social climate. The retrospective survey offered here is not an account of every artwork displayed in the public domain. Instead it plugs into and shares a number of patterns or repeated points of focus seen in works presented for 2016.</p>
<p>Minshall and film team Abigail Hadeed and Maria Govan put a spotlight on several matters including that of gender politics. Minshall’s depiction of The Dying Swan was a man dressed as a woman, performing on the pointed toes of moko-jumbie stilts, in the King of Carnival competition. Hadeed (producer) and Govan (director and writer) shared their film Play the Devil, in which the protagonist grapples with his manhood and homosexuality against a context of religion, masquerade, economics and patriarchy. With Carnival as a common thread, these artists stirred viewers to consider what it means to take on the role of “man” or “woman”—what it means to play or perform in and across gender boundaries.</p>
<p>Joshua Lue Chee Kong and Shawn Peters invited the public to look beyond an idyllic veneer. Lue Chee Kong’s exhibition Paradise and Peters’ Down, Down The Rabbit’s Hole underscored a nightmarish reality seething beneath a surface script of sun, sea and sand in sweet T&amp;T.</p>
<p>Works by Wendy Nanan and Adele Todd explored a fine line between opposing forces. Nanan’s papier mâché sculptural forms with their spiraling shells foregrounded ideas of birth and death as allied energies in a generative cycle. Instead of an ending, death can be interpreted as a beginning, as part of a process of renewal. In one sense, her work served as an index for reassessing the state of T&amp;T and contemplating opportunities for transforming demise into new life.</p>
<p>Todd’s exhibition Black Guard offered embroidered images of T&amp;T’s security personnel in a national colour palette of red, black and white. With figures often occupying a small part of her fabric surfaces, Todd’s compositions carried large negative spaces; what might be considered unguarded, vulnerable spaces. Yet those spaces were rendered in a vibrant red—a hue that represents the vitality of T&amp;T’s land and its people. Her images put vulnerability and vitality in tension with each other. While Todd’s art celebrated those who take on the task of keeping people safe, it also pointed to the idea that a line can be quickly crossed and a protector can become a rogue or blackguard. Todd used delightful wordplay: black guard and blackguard to underscore her concerns.</p>
<p>If Minshall, Hadeed, Govan, Nanan, Todd, Lue Chee Kong and Peters pointed out certain ways of looking at the local milieu, such designers as Kriston Chen, Agyei Archer and Debbie Estwick offered their own way of seeing. Instead of casting their gaze outside the region for inspiration, these designers looked within, using the fete signs by sign painter Bruce Cayonne as the stimulus for innovative offshoots.</p>
<p>Chen used Cayonne’s hand-painted lettering to produce a digital Fete font in uppercase characters while Archer designed the font Cayonne Sans. Estwick repurposed Cayonne’s discarded signs, cutting them up into smaller pieces that now serve as covers for notebooks.</p>
<p>Along with looking within, some artists opted to look back. Carnival masquerade designer Brian Mac Farlane launched his 2017 band Cazabon: The Art of Living, with designs steeped in the era of the 1800s. According to Mac Farlane “the time of Cazabon was the most beautiful.” Using such market positioning strategies as “#KnowYourPath,” “#KnowYourPeople” and “#KnowYourPlace” the designer offered a vision of what he referred to as “glory days.” However, images of such costumes as the plantation houseboy and beautiful woman—modelled by a black man and white woman—provoked outrage among a number of members of society.</p>
<p>How then to look back? Jasmine Thomas-Girvan’s exhibition Dreaming Backwards: The Magic of Breaking the Spell gave an answer. Her work took audiences on a journey in time across a span of centuries, addressing colonialism in a way that was not mawkish.</p>
<p>While Mac Farlane called for people to know their place, the team at Alice Yard set their tenth anniversary celebrations in motion with their Out of Place project.</p>
<p>The initiative was conceptualised by Alice Yard’s co-director Christopher Cozier and Bahamian-born, London-based artist Blue Curry who lived and worked at the Yard during the month of September.</p>
<p>Out of Place (an ongoing project) is driven by a number of questions including how to shift encounters of visual objects and actions from formal places such as galleries and museums to more public spaces.</p>
<p>A key ethos arising from the Out of Place project was that of collaboration.</p>
<p>Blue Curry partnered with doubles and sno cone vendors, a barbershop, espresso bar and dentist’s office among other people and locations in Port-of-Spain, bringing attention to creative experiences and strategies in everyday life.</p>
<p>“Blue Curry Specials” included a unique hair design, free toothpaste with a dental cleaning, a taxi ride at a discounted price, and doubles spiced with Blue Curry’s recipe for pineapple sauce.</p>
<p>A sweet, collaborative venture was also found in new work by Cocobel Chocolate.</p>
<p>Isabel Brash introduced chocolate bars in five flavours, with packaging featuring a commissioned drawing by Brianna McCarthy.</p>
<p>The year 2016 provided moments to see connections, reconsider social constructs, plumb fertile ground, destroy illusions, stare down depravity and consider time past, present and future.</p>
<p>What is envisioned for 2017?</p>
<p>In what ways will local artists respond to the world around them?</p>
<p>What will they help society see and understand? A new year is often an opportunity to recalibrate sight.</p>
<p><strong>EDITOR'S NOTE:</strong></p>
<p>Marsha Pearce is a cultural studies lecturer at UWI, St Augustine, and writes on art for the Sunday Arts Section.</p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 02 Jan 2017 01:16:00 +0000alexk124737 at http://www2.guardian.co.ttMarsha PearceDreaming with her handshttp://www2.guardian.co.tt/arts/2016-12-20/dreaming-her-hands
<div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://www2.guardian.co.tt/sites/default/files/field/image/TributaryGaze%20JThomasGirvan.jpg" width="400" height="270" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>​“We must sleep with eyes open, we must dream with our hands…till the dream engenders in the sleeper’s flank the red wheat-ear of resurrection…we must dream backwards, toward the source, we must row back up the centuries…we must break down the walls between man and man, reunite what has been sundered…we must…dream inwardly and also outwardly.”</p>
<p>Lines from the poem The Broken Waterjar by Mexican writer Octavio Paz become a pivot point for Jasmine Thomas-Girvan’s recent exhibition Dreaming Backwards: The Magic of Breaking the Spell. In an equally exquisite and unnerving amalgamation of various materials: feathers, silver, wood, bronze, glass, ceramics, palm fronds and calabash, along with an array of sources of information—from the writings of Derek Walcott and Nancy Morejon, to the Princess and the Pea fairy tale, Roman Catholic and Haitian Vodoun iconography and jazz/blues music-the artist elicits a deep, visceral response as she traverses the waters of time in a reverse flow toward a traumatic history.</p>
<p>Thomas-Girvan first invites audiences inside themselves with a fitting piece in glass titled Open Your Eyes and Look Within. The figure stands with head bent, eyes set on the chest and arms open as if cradling a swell of years and an egg shape of possibilities. In order to “row back up the centuries,” Thomas-Girvan presents Sleeping Beauty, an elongated figure fixed to the gallery wall like the oar of a boat. With toes pointed and frame pulled, the figure stretches across weeks, months, ages.</p>
<p>If audiences continue in a chronological ordering of the artworks, they move from Sleeping Beauty on the wall out to the piece Medicine for All Things, which stands on a plinth, and back to the gallery wall for the sailing vessel and its navigator titled Tributary Gaze. The exhibition layout again dictates another move outward to the piece Rooted and a return to the wall for another watercraft work called A Refuge: Weapons From Far Off Lands. This thoughtful arrangement of art carries audiences in an undulating fashion like the movement of waves. Visitors find themselves on a liquid journey to the past, travelling and dreaming inward and outward like a running stitch in time.</p>
<p>Thomas-Girvan offers a candid voyage. In her dreamscape palm fronds, lined with brilliant feathers, curl in a serpentine manner. At the tip a curious figure of bulbous bits is found dangling. The piece references the song Strange Fruit (performed by such singers as Billie Holiday and Nina Simone), which tells of the heinous practice of lynching and the sight of black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, like strange fruit hanging from trees. To heighten the sonic reference point Thomas-Girvan includes tuning pegs, which extend from the body of the fronds. Nature can now be read as a guitar. Yet, those pegs resonate on other levels. They also hint at the form of human cargo seen in illustrations of the hull of slave ships and, if regarded as a series of oars, they maintain that idea of rowing, of propelling self along passages before now.</p>
<p>If viewers stay in the dream they encounter the monstrous mask of civility and the deceptive cloak of fine dining. Thomas-Girvan presents a cross as a table. It is at once a symbol of atonement and a crossroads at which audiences must stop and think about the present and future as part of their meditation on the past. The table is set with a lace-fringed tablecloth, china cups and saucers, and silverware.</p>
<p>Yet on closer inspection, cups hold blood instead of tea, an image that calls to mind Barbadian artist Annalee Davis’ drawing Blood Sweetened Beverage currently on display at the University of Texas—Austin, as part of her own investigation of a plantation heritage. Other disquieting elements can be found among the tableware. A spoonful of sugar carries a head with an open mouth—a silent cry amid the sweetness—while scores of arms reach out desperately from a slit in a covered dish, in the piece Wasn’t That a Vanity Dish To Set Before the King. From the spout of a teapot comes a cow horn or abeng (as it is known by the maroons of Jamaica). It is a symbol of a call for emancipation. If viewers bypass these details, Thomas-Girvan makes sure her subversion of a setting of seeming opulence and comfort is evident. She adds a bird to this grand sculpture in a strategic move. Its beak tugs on the tablecloth, toppling crockery and leaving shattered pieces on the floor.</p>
<p>Of note too is the position of the final piece in the show titled Sinking or Swimming. It is a serving platter with a partially submerged figure. Speaking about this specific work Thomas-Girvan said: “Many times complacency makes us think we are floating when in fact we are sinking, even being pulled under by a system that at a glance appears beautifully benign. We must be vigilant.” To view the piece, audiences come full circle in the gallery, passing the aforementioned glass figure, as a reminder that time can be cyclical and subject to repeated events. Be careful. What exists in the past does not always stay there.</p>
<p>This exhibition exposes layers of anxiety and addresses lingering tastes, vanity, anguish and unconsciousness. To break the hex of colonialism and quash the spell of stupefaction and division, Jasmine Thomas-Girvan delivers a potion through a hybrid vocabulary that splices together words and images. This is not a nostalgic offering. The work is handsomely difficult and audiences ultimately bear witness to an artist dreaming with her hands. Her pieces capture in myriad, vivid ways the thinking of Martinican intellectual Aimé Césaire who recognises that “the shortest way to the future is always one that involves a deep understanding of the past.”</p>
</div></div></div>Tue, 20 Dec 2016 05:21:17 +0000alexk124392 at http://www2.guardian.co.ttMarsha PearceCreating from memory http://www2.guardian.co.tt/lifestyle/2016-12-11/creating-memory
<div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://www2.guardian.co.tt/sites/default/files/field/image/Kelley.jpg" width="400" height="909" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>Since being given a class assignment to explore a memory, Jamaican emerging artist Kelley-Ann Lindo has been excavating and scrutinizing her bank of experiences.</p>
<p>What she remembers is a literal flood of personal history. Her childhood home always succumbed to a rush of water from heavy rainfall.</p>
<p>“I expected it to happen—being underwater or with water up to my waist in the house,” she said. According to her, “the questions came” while pursuing a BFA in painting at the Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts (EMC). She asked: “Why did this happen?”</p>
<p>Lindo would visualise her answers in the form of an installation created for her graduation exhibition, a piece that incorporated damaged furniture from her house. “I was picking things up, trying to piece together, trying to mend things,” she said.</p>
<p>The 2015 graduate of the EMC is the latest artist in residence at Alice Yard, Woodbrook. Her creative work during her stay in Trinidad is still defined by an engagement with her past, and the question of why, but the memory now set in her sights is that of her parents’ migration to North America.</p>
<p>Lindo had never travelled beyond Jamaica’s shores before this, and it is her first time participating in an artist residency. She came to Trinidad with unresolved feelings about the physical absence of her parents and planned to create work using a suitcase as a motif but she toyed with the use of new memories in the making.</p>
<p>“I arrived and thought I would explore my travel experiences,” she said. However, she could not ignore the pull of a restless past.</p>
<p>The trigger for her new work is a number of images her mother recently supplied via email. “She sent images of me as a child, ones I had never seen before. A lot of my baby pictures were damaged by flooding,” she said. Lindo was immediately captivated by her silhouette in the photographs: a contour of her head with her hair in two plaits.</p>
<p>“I looked at the images and found them strange. They were not me but I pulled the silhouette and started to draw,” she said.</p>
<p>Other sources of information would intersect with her art making. Lindo came across the film Auntie by Barbadian filmmaker Lisa Harewood. The film addresses the issue of migration and the phenomenon of barrel children. (The term “barrel children” refers to children left behind by parents seeking a better life overseas. These children often receive barrels of clothes and other items from these family members now living abroad).</p>
<p>Pamela Marshall’s novel Barrel Child also had an impact on her. “I found similarities between these stories and my own,” Lindo said.</p>
<p>Through processes of drawing and printing with ink and graphite, Lindo has produced several different visuals of a child, each one simultaneously her and not her. Her silhouette now serves as a container or barrel for multiple narratives of loss, longing, anxiety and hope.</p>
<p>Her image is an emblem of a collective of children across the Caribbean who must grapple with a separation from their family members.</p>
<p>“Before I knew it, I had 50 drawings. Then 50 turned to 100. Now I have about 135 drawings. I was thinking about doing 200 or 300 to reference a sense of the large number of people this has happened to,” she said.</p>
<p>Lindo is also exploring the possibility of creating video work—stop motion animation—using the drawings. In this way she is pushing and pulling her memories across different media, testing the pliability of her experiences.</p>
<p>The Alice Yard residency experience comes with its own durability for this 25 year old, whose time in T&amp;T has taken vivid shape in her mind.</p>
</div></div></div>Sun, 11 Dec 2016 19:54:54 +0000alexk124069 at http://www2.guardian.co.ttMarsha PearceWhat it’s like to PLAY BAThttp://www2.guardian.co.tt/lifestyle/2016-11-20/what-it%E2%80%99s-play-bat
<div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://www2.guardian.co.tt/sites/default/files/field/image/bat_44.png" width="400" height="264" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p><strong>W</strong><strong>hat is it like to be a bat? Philosopher Thomas Nagel asked this question in 1974, in his paper, which argued that there is a subjective quality to conscious experience—that there exists something that it is like “to be” a particular organism. </strong></p>
<p>Using the bat as an example, Nagel notes that it is tough for humans to imagine being a bat. He writes, “Bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine.”</p>
<p>Yet the traditional Carnival masquerade form of the bat has called on people in T&amp;T for years to push their imaginations to the limit.</p>
<p>The group exhibition titled Bat Show gives audiences a look at the many ways humans can play—portray, enact, perform as—bat. Peter Doig’s new oil washes titled Man Dressed as Bat, reinforce the perspective of a human being beneath the skin of the bat costume. His images are evocative of the poster created in 1970 by designer Henryk Tomaszewski for the short opera Die Fledermaus (The Bat).</p>
<p>They also echo Embah’s 2015 glittery bat sculptures, which are cleverly included in this exhibition— giving audiences an opportunity to see influences and connections between creative practitioners. In one of Doig’s images, the man dressed as bat is bathed in back lighting so that he glows, while in the other image, a rim-lighting effect gives a striking outline to the winged figure.</p>
<p>Both works are powerfully dramatic. If Doig’s pieces emphasise the bat as a theatrical role, works by other artists in the show illustrate precisely how the bat character can be staged.</p>
<p>Jackie Hinkson’s drawings show the tension in the legs and the twist in the spine that occur when the energies of bat, human and the music of the Carnival season intertwine. Adele Todd’s black embroidered bats, set against black fabric, are technical feats.</p>
<p>They capture such details as a leap on one leg coupled with the undulating movement of the bat wings to suggest a creature about to take flight. Ashraph’s bat studies offer beautiful permutations of the way the wind might tug on the wings, giving rise to a range of shapes in space.</p>
<p>The rhythm in Leo Basso’s brush strokes lends a kinetic quality to his depiction of Bats Dancing On the Streets. His pigments come and go on the surface of the board in a manner that invokes the flitter flutter of a bat. Paul Kain’s Ah Come Out to Play and Che Lovelace’s painting, titled simply Bat, express total abandon or rather the effort to relinquish what it is to be a human and move as much as possible toward being a bat.</p>
<p>Although it may not be possible to take on bat consciousness entirely—to know with certainty what it is like for a bat to be a bat—this small but visually robust exhibition shows the sheer delight for humans, and the art, in playing. Bat Show is curated by Ashraph and runs at The Frame Shop, corner of Roberts and Carlos Streets, Woodbrook, until December 3. For more info: Call 628-7508.</p>
</div></div></div>Sun, 20 Nov 2016 06:08:02 +0000jbirch101123305 at http://www2.guardian.co.ttMarsha PearceUWI certificate show plays it safehttp://www2.guardian.co.tt/lifestyle/2016-05-22/uwi-certificate-show-plays-it-safe
<div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://www2.guardian.co.tt/sites/default/files/field/image/Power_MicahTPhillip2016.png" width="400" height="330" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>“An essential element of any art is risk,” says acclaimed filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola in an interview for the 99U creative blog. According to him, risk-taking can lead to the creation of something that has not been seen before. For the first time in a number of years, UWI’s exhibition of works by students of the visual arts certificate programme demonstrated a lack of that essential element—it was a show bereft of adventure. </p>
<p>Walls bore predictable studies of flora and fauna in pastels, pencil, pen and paint. Other subject matter included architecture, J’Ouvert and a look at facial expressions. Zára Montoute’s drawings of friends and family depicted joyous faces while Anika Black-Haynes charted the changing physiognomy of an individual from toddler to adult phases of development.</p>
<p>Taken as a whole, the works carried a mechanical aura with a patent effort to render the various subjects “correctly.” A statement by Black-Haynes, which accompanied her pieces, reinforced this feeling. “I am challenging my abilities to draw realistically (and) blend colours properly,” she wrote.</p>
<p>The Department of Creative and Festival Arts certificate programme is different from its fine art and design degree programme which showed its final-year works at the National Museum from April 13-May 14. The certificate programme aims to teach fundamental drawing and design skills and to expose students to various techniques of studio practice. </p>
<p>Indeed, a strong foundation in methods is needed but what about sparking the imagination? What about prodding a vision that goes beyond seeing what is immediately in front of the canvas or paper? What about instigating a personal response? Technique and insight can go hand in hand. Both seeds can be planted and have been in the past. What happened with this cohort?</p>
<p>High points of the exhibition were some of the outdoor sculptural forms, specifically the giant dreamcatcher-cum-wind chime by Montoute and Ornella Sequea’s pod seat, which echoed a corn bird’s nest. While these were not novel ideas the students showed a sensitive approach to their engineering of materials and an acute eye for the way in which their works occupied space.</p>
<p>The most memorable work was Micah Telesford Phillip’s Power series. Her acrylic paintings explored the political climate with an underscoring of the nexus of an almighty power and the authority politicians wield. Her piece Judgment renders politicians as liars with Pinocchio noses. Images of a snake, scorpion and rat are symbolic of deception. In the background of the painting she makes a spiritual reference as she shows the politicians leaving office, each with a cross to bear. </p>
<p>Her art was noteworthy precisely because it attempted both image-making craft and interpretation. It offered her way of seeing. </p>
</div></div></div>Sun, 22 May 2016 04:09:41 +0000jbirch101117083 at http://www2.guardian.co.ttMarsha PearceA spectrum of Jewels http://www2.guardian.co.tt/lifestyle/2016-05-01/spectrum-jewels
<div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://www2.guardian.co.tt/sites/default/files/field/image/ring_Jardine.png" width="400" height="354" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>The title Spectrum is an easy fit for an exhibition featuring a range of work by eight jewellery designers. Y Art Gallery’s latest show runs the gamut of responses to the show’s overarching concept—from the anticipated to the unforeseen.</p>
<p>Pieces by Barbara Jardine and Sarah-May Marshall reflect a response to the theme in terms of the band of colours seen when light passes through a prism. </p>
<p>Marshall’s juicy ring collection is exactly that: luscious in its presentation of various hues. Her gemstones in yellow topaz, aquamarine, peridot and amethyst sit atop bands in silver and gold. </p>
<p>Jardine continues her work with the sea urchin shell, a medium that has become an expected component of her repertoire, but this time she invites us to taste the rainbow with her earrings, pendants and rings that are reminiscent of the shape and vibrant pigments of the Skittles brand of fruit-flavoured candy.</p>
<p>Of course, a spectrum is not solely about colour. It also refers to a span or scale running between extreme ends. Janice Derrick’s simple forms explore the extremes of sharp points and soft curves while Rachel Ross offers a dramatic selection that demonstrates her sensitive play with light and dark. </p>
<p>Ross’ pieces combine pearls, oxidised silver, black coral, black diamonds and hematite in a stirring, monochromatic display.</p>
<p>Jade Drakes shows deftness in her work with such materials as wood, bone, pen nibs and fur, on the one hand, and silver, gold, diamonds, rubies and emeralds on the other. Her brooches, in particular, quickly slide from the category of jewellery to that of sculpture. </p>
<p>Jasmine Thomas-Girvan maintains her own captivating approach to jewellery-cum-three-dimensional-figures. She presents a fantastic world of hybrid forms including a piece that is seemingly part man, part ram goat and part dragonfly. In her constructed realm, precious metals and stones are melded with a backdrop of Cazabon’s art and the poetry of Martin Carter, among other creative sources. The result is a spectrum that runs from past to present, with a consideration of the future—a scope that culls from the written word, painted images, reality and imagination.</p>
<p>Ashraph, too, dances in that space between jewellery and statuette. His rings take their shapes and personalities from the parotia bird of New Guinea. Circles mimic fanned feathers and his incorporation of felt suggests soft plumes. His inspiration is unexpected and fresh.</p>
<p>It is however, the work of Sonya Sanchez-Arias that attends to the theme in a most striking manner. She exposes a spectrum of possibilities for plastic shopping bags, cups and straws, a crushed soda can and galvanised metal. These mundane materials are transformed into unpredictable pieces, shedding in many instances any indication of their former selves.</p>
<p>Overall, the various elements of Spectrum fulfil the show’s title but given last year’s theme of Light, the 2016 conceptual thread holding this exhibit together is not a huge leap. This display of jewellery is now an annual event with largely the same designers featured (this is Sanchez-Arias’ first presentation in this grouping). Therefore, it would be interesting to see what adventurous directions these designers might take with a more challenging topic.</p>
<p>Spectrum is Y Art Gallery’s fourth annual Jewelbox show, held at 26 Taylor Street, Woodbrook. It opened on April 24 and continues until May 7.</p>
<p><strong>More info</strong><br />
Call 628-4165 or email <a href="mailto:yartgallerytt@gmail.com">yartgallerytt@gmail.com</a></p>
</div></div></div>Sun, 01 May 2016 03:41:38 +0000jbirch101116357 at http://www2.guardian.co.ttMarsha PearceSybil Atteck, Great woman artisthttp://www2.guardian.co.tt/lifestyle/2016-01-31/sybil-atteck-great-woman-artist
<div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://www2.guardian.co.tt/sites/default/files/field/image/Bele_c1956_SAtteck.png" width="400" height="294" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>The Art Society’s recent exhibition of works by Sybil Atteck—one of the society’s founders, its first secretary and a former president—put a spotlight on the question of greatness in art.</p>
<p> In 1971, four years before the passing of Atteck, art historian Linda Nochlin wrote the essay Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? According to Nochlin, the title of the piece originated from her encounter with an art dealer who posed the question while sharing that he wanted to show women artists but could not find good ones. </p>
<p>Nochlin argues that the question is founded on assumptions about what it takes to make art. It presumes a kind of thinking that focuses less on social shaping forces and instead promotes the idea that great art is created by someone (more often a white male) who carries a “mysterious power” or “genius.”</p>
<p>She lists such artists as Michelangelo, Van Gogh and Jackson Pollock as those who would fall under the label of Great Artists—as those who would be regarded as possessing that “magical aura.” She adds that the question of great women artists should point to the social circumstances and institutions which affect art-making practice by women. </p>
<p>Coupled with Nochlin’s argument is her suggestion of what making great art entails. She writes: “The making of art involves a self-consistent language of form, more or less dependent upon, or free from, given temporally-defined conventions, schemata or systems of notation, which have to be learned or worked out, either through teaching, apprenticeship or a long period of individual experimentation.”</p>
<p>Atteck’s place within T&amp;T’s art history is characterised by greatness, not because there was a genius embedded within her, but rather because of her surmounting of certain social conditions, her appropriation of a visual language that boldly defied image-making conventions of the day and her attention to growth through her commitment to teaching, learning from others and testing various art media.</p>
<p>In the 1940s, Atteck’s bachelor’s degree education in fine art at the Washington University, Missouri, exposed her to abstract forms and expressionist approaches that influenced her work. She faced criticism within the local space, with her art being described as not having the aesthetic of T&amp;T. </p>
<p>What should local art look like? Which styles are acceptable in the local art market? Atteck pushed against the status quo, stirring debate about identity in pre-independence T&amp;T, conversations that continue today. </p>
<p>Later in the 60s, she was asked to produce murals for the Hilton hotel. In a biography of Atteck, her sister-in-law Helen explains that in order to fulfil the job of creating the work for the hotel, Sybil Atteck asked for sabbatical from teaching at a girls’ high school but “her request was denied.” </p>
<p>Helen Atteck notes: “Sybil had the courage to resign her position in order to take on this challenge. It was a monumental task. She hired a carpenter to build a covered shed in her backyard with a long tray of the dimensions she reckoned she would need for one mural.”</p>
<p>Atteck not only saw to the building of a place for her own work, she was also instrumental in carving out a space for art in T&amp;T as a founding member of the Trinidad Art Society. Historian Geoffrey MacLean documents that the group met in Atteck’s living room. She gave art classes, facilitated exhibitions and is said to have influenced the work of Carlisle Chang, Willie Chen, Leo Glasgow and Nina Squires, among others.</p>
<p>The show at the Art Society, which closed on January 20, gave audiences a chance to see Atteck’s art, on loan from private and corporate collectors. Pieces on display showed a span of roughly four decades of art making. What was evident was her attention to experimenting with various techniques, from the frottage which defines the piece Caroni Swamp to the scumbling seen in The Rubber Tree. The work demonstrated her play with both two and three-dimensional form, indeed her capacity to work in watercolours, oil, clay and more. </p>
<p>Atteck’s art also illustrated her sensitivity to how a mark on canvas interacts with a viewer. Her bold lines and shapes in such works as The Fishermen and Kings Wharf directly confront an audience, in contrast to her suggestion of form as in the piece The Balloon Seller, where the hint of a gate described with the whisper of brushstrokes lures the viewer in.</p>
<p>The exhibition gave insight to an artist courageously working out a language over time, showing a honing of skill. Atteck’s power is no mystery. Her greatness lies in her pioneering spirit and steadfastness.</p>
<p><strong>More info</strong></p>
<p>The Sybil Atteck: Iconic Artist, Trinidad and Tobago exhibition ran from January 11–20, 2016. It is the first in a series of events planned for the Art Society’s Legacy Project.</p>
<p>Visit: bit.ly/1QGMoVX/</p>
</div></div></div>Sun, 31 Jan 2016 04:34:06 +0000jbirch101113124 at http://www2.guardian.co.ttMarsha Pearce